Breakthrough Listen

Why Is the Pentagon Now Saying That UFOs Are Real?

June 3, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Charlie Burton May 18, 2021 (gq-magazine.co.uk)

• On April 27, 2020, the US Department of Defense (DoD) released three fighter jet videos – one from 2004, two from 2015 – that showed close encounters with fast-moving objects seeming to interact with Navy aircraft and vessels. The footage had previously leaked to the media, but now the government was putting it on the record “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public”. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.

• The Navy pilot who captured 2004 UFO footage described the smooth, white, oblong object as resembling a ‘Tic Tac’. It seemed to defy the laws of physics – it had no visible wings, rotors, propulsion system or exhaust plume. Yet it could achieve hypersonic speeds without making a sonic boom; it could descend from 50,000 to 100 feet in a matter of seconds; and it could change direction instantaneously as if without inertia. None of that should even be possible.

• Commander David Fravor said the 40-foot object ran rings around his jet, reacting to its maneuvers and jamming its radar, before disappearing in a heartbeat. “After 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close,” he told ABC News. “I can tell you, I think it was not from this world.” The New York Times reported that between 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots observed UFOs almost daily. There was even a near midair collision.

• Last July, US senator Marco Rubio told CBS that the issue was a pressing national security concern: “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises. We don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours.” The Pentagon created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force to study the UFO/UAP phenomenon, and in December, Congress passed a bill requiring the director of national intelligence and the defense secretary to submit a report on what they know about the UAP issue. This report is due in June.

• For decades, the notion of UFOs has been ridiculed and defined by a lack of hard evidence and official denials. In that context, the US government admitting UFOs are real is monumental. But officials haven’t made the leap to calling these objects extraterrestrial. In December, former CIA director John Brennan said UAPs might involve “a different form of life”. The implications are profound.

• And yet, UFOs are still often treated by news anchors with a smirk. In science and academia the subject remains taboo fringe research. Swaths of the public are unaware, and many of those who are aware either refuse to believe or simply don’t care. Christopher Mellon, a former senior defense official, told Joe Rogan that, after the 2017 New York Times front page UFO article, he was stunned that almost nobody in Congress asked for a briefing.

• How myopic do you have to be? Even if UFOs aren’t extraterrestrial, the consequences could be seismic. If China, say, has beyond-next-gen technology that can violate restricted airspace with impunity, that’s a paradigm shift.

• Christopher French, professor of psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, says, “If people have made up their minds, one way or the other, it’s one of those issues where it’s very hard to change [their views]. Arguably the most powerful cognitive bias that we all suffer from is confirmation bias. We pay more attention to evidence that supports what we already believe to be true or what we would like to be true.”

• But in other contexts we are happy to countenance the idea of extraterrestrials. NASA’s primary goal for Mars exploration is to “seek signs of life”. The University Of California, Berkeley, facilitates a $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen “aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth”.

• “Meanwhile we have these things flying around our atmosphere, that we’re seeing on the radar, that kind of look and act like what you might expect if somebody sent a probe [to Earth]… And yet the scientific community and the government have not wanted to dare to ask the question,” as Mellon told Rogan.

• It’s vital that this attitude changes. If you believe there is only the slimmest chance UAPs represents ‘impossible technology’, humanity owes it to itself to fully investigate. It has been said there are only two Holy Grail questions: is there an afterlife and are we alone in the universe? If whether UFOs are real is no longer a question, the question becomes: ‘what the hell are they?’

• [Editor’s Note] We must keep in mind that so long as our governments are controlled by the deep state, it will never give the people the full truth about anything. Any information coming from the deep state government will be a contrived narrative to forward a deep state agenda. In the case of UFOs, the deep state has lied about and ridiculed the subject since World War II. Their agenda for the past 70 years has been to divert public attention from the true existence of intelligent and technologically advanced extraterrestrial beings visiting our planet in their UFO craft so that the deep state rulers could monopolize this extraterrestrial technology for themselves to develop their own secret space programs and breakaway civilization which doesn’t include us.

Notwithstanding the corrupt deep state government and the complicit media’s ridicule and suppression of ETs/UFOs, there are decades of widespread and compelling testimonial, documentary and photographic evidence that ETs and UFOs do exist. Of course, the deep state media is ignoring all of that and regards the only credible UFO evidence to be the grainy cockpit images of small drone-like objects that seem to have a fixation with our military ships and aircraft. They want the public to know that UFOs are real, but then act like they have no idea what they are. This creates a scenario where they could be labeled as a threat – either from a hostile extraterrestrial civilization or even from China or Russia.

So the deep state agenda here is to create an unknown threat from some drone UFOs swarming Navy ships off of California. (Keep in mind that even these drone UFOs have been around for a long time, and have had every opportunity to attack us if they wanted to.) The truth is that the positive extraterrestrials do not show themselves, and the negative extraterrestrials have already infiltrated our government and industries for their own agenda (i.e.: the deep state). The UFO craft that we now see are generally made by human secret space programs using extraterrestrial technologies – patented by the US Navy over the past five years.

The deep state doesn’t want the public to know that they have this capability. They want the public to think that no one knows what these drone UFOs are or where they come from. And apparently, they have been silencing anyone who threatens this deep state narrative. (see below Dr Michael Salla’s video: “Is Deep State Silencing Insiders That Threaten ‘UFOs Are a National Security Threat’ Narrative?”)

Now that more and more people are ‘waking up’ and the deep state is losing the ‘Information War’ to terrestrial and off-planet forces of the white hat Alliance, they plan to use this sudden revelation of the existence of UFOs in a last ditch effort to control the masses. It might even culminate in a fake ‘false flag’ UFO hologram invasion. This would come after they’ve sufficiently weakened our society by fraudulently installing a puppet president to facilitate a fake pandemic, spread death through gene-altering vaccines, crashed our economy, gutted our medical system, created an energy shortage and a food shortage, and targeted for prosecution so-called ‘domestic terrorists’, who are actually awakened patriots willing to stand up to save our republic from this evil deep state agenda.

So the question is not ‘what are these UFOs?’, but ‘what is the real agenda of the deep state in publicizing these UFO drones?’

UFOs are real – and we have videos to prove it. It’s an extraordinary claim, but that’s precisely

what the Pentagon told the world last year. On 27 April 2020, the US Department Of Defense (DoD) released three videos, one from 2004, two from 2015, shot from the targeting cameras of US Navy Super Hornet fighter jets. They show close encounters with fast-moving, strange-looking objects and include audio of the pilots’ astonishment (“Wow! What is that, man?”). The footage had previously leaked to media organisations, but now the government was putting it on the record. “DoD is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real,” it said in an official statement. “The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.”

The pilot who captured the 2004 UFO footage, while flying a mission from the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, has described the smooth, white, oblong object as resembling a Tic Tac.

Although it was observed by multiple military aviators and detected by radar, it seemed to defy the laws of physics. The Navy pilots say it had no visible wings, rotors or propulsion system – infrared cameras didn’t even detect an exhaust plume. Yet it could achieve hypersonic speeds without making a sonic boom; it could descend from 50,000 to 100 feet in a matter of seconds; and it could change direction instantaneously as if without inertia. None of that should even be possible.

One of the other pilots who saw the UFO, Commander David Fravor, then head of the US Navy’s Black Aces combat squadron, said the 40-foot object ran rings around his jet, reacting to its manoeuvres and jamming its radar, before disappearing in a heartbeat. “After 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can

see in that realm, and this was nothing close,” he told ABC News. “I can tell you, I

think it was not from this world.” It wasn’t a one-off. The New York Times reports that between 2014 and 2015, Navy pilots observed UFOs almost daily. There was even a near midair collision.

In 2017, the New York Times made the Navy sightings – and the existence of a secret Pentagon programme investigating such occurrences – a front-page news story. Since then, further Navy videos have emerged and “unidentified aerial phenomena” (or “UAP”, the new official term that has replaced the now-stigmatised “unidentified flying object”) have become a serious talking point. Last July, for instance, the US senator Marco Rubio told CBS that the issue was a pressing national security concern: “We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises. We don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours.” The following month, the Pentagon created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force “to improve its understanding of, and gain insight into, the nature and origins of UAPs”. Most significantly, in December, Congress passed a bill requiring the director of national intelligence and the defence secretary to submit a report on what they know about the UAP issue. The report is due in June.

10:59 minute Michael Salla video discussing the mysterious silencing of UFO insiders (‘Michael Salla’ YouTube)

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A New Frontier in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

January 15, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Adam Frank December 31, 2020 (washingtonpost.com)

• On December 18th, ‘Breakthrough Listen’ – a privately funded offshoot of SETI, the ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’ – detected a distant “candidate signal” labeled BLC-1, which SETI astronomers would like to think is coming from another intelligent civilization in the galaxy. Of course, these scientists are quick to point out that it is probably not coming from another civilization, but just radio interference from our own planet.

• The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence began more than 60 years ago. Proponents of SETI have long complained that there has never been sufficient funding or telescope time available to make a dent in the effort. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congressional legislators withheld “wasteful” SETI funding, and it has survived since on private funding from millionaires like Yuri Milner who in 2015 pledged $100 million to create Breakthrough Listen.

• Jason Wright and his astronomy colleagues at Penn State have argued that the reason we have not found life elsewhere in the universe is simple: We haven’t really looked. If the galaxy were an ocean, so far astronomers have splashed around in just one hot-tub’s worth of water.

• With Milner’s funding, the Breakthrough Listen project was provided access to telescopes from the Parkes radio dish in Australia and the Green Bank instrument in West Virginia, and resources to explore new search methods and technologies. These include machine-learning initiatives designed to accelerate “classic” SETI research. Artificial intelligence can enable computers to identify those all-important ‘weirdness needles’ in the cosmic signal haystack of data. The next generation of instruments, including the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, should enable SETI astronomers to explore the atmospheres of smaller, Earthlike planets and search for the chemical imprint of an exo-biosphere.

• Meanwhile, the ‘exoplanet revolution’ opened a second frontier in the search for ET. In the mid-1990s, astronomers found the first exoplanet, a Jupiter-size world on a four-day orbit around the star 51 Pegasi. Today, we know that almost every star in the sky hosts a family of worlds. Scientists worldwide are building a census of alien planets, showing which stars have planets and which planets are in the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” where surface temperatures are just right (that is, anywhere between freezing and boiling) for life to form. As a result, astronomers can find out exactly where they should be looking for life and intelligence.

• Astronomers are also gaining the capacity to probe the atmospheres of distant planets for ‘biosignatures’. By interrogating light passing through a far-flung world’s gaseous veil, astronomers can compile its chemical inventory and see what’s in the planet’s atmosphere. Alien astronomers looking at Earth, for example, would see oxygen and methane in our atmosphere — a signature of life’s presence on our planet. Scientists have already explored the atmospheres of a few Jupiter-size exoplanets.

• But why stop at biosignatures? The presence of technology on a planet might be far more detectable than biology. Telescopes on the drawing boards right now might have the capacity to see city lights on distant worlds. In 2019, NASA awarded the first-ever research grant to study atmospheric technosignatures, with two more funded in 2020. All this means that the search for technosignatures is becoming just as plausible and just as important as the search for biosignatures, representing a thrilling new face of SETI, embracing both anomaly-based searches and targeted explorations of exoplanets and their environments.

• The truth about the search for intelligent exo-civilizations is that it’s probably going to take a lot of time and effort. That’s the price you pay for great science. This extraordinary journey — taking us to the shores of alien worlds — is really only just getting started. Something remarkable is happening in the science of life and intelligence beyond Earth. The age of “technosignatures” is dawning.

• [Editor’s Note] The boys at SETI are dedicated… dedicated, that is, to making sure that the average person remains woefully ignorant of the multitude of intelligent beings and civilizations that permeate our galaxy and universe. Seth Shostak and his accomplices at SETI are simply shills for the deep state. The deep state controls several secret space programs that interact constantly with mostly negative extraterrestrial beings, and have access to their advanced technologies which the deep state wants to maintain for themselves only, in order to preserve their advantage.

But it appears that 2021 will usher in a new level of disclosure of this underlying deep state cabal that has repressed the natural technological and spiritual development of the human species on this Earth since World War II, when the presence of extraterrestrial beings, both benevolent and malevolent, greatly increased in response to our species’ own technological achievements. Suddenly, Earth humans were a more interesting species to scrutinize, and more valuable to exploit. By using human (?) deep state operatives to infiltrate all aspects of government and society, these negative beings orchestrated a false reality which has supported their control agenda for the past seventy years.

We have a unique opportunity now to expose this deep state cabal and the negative extraterrestrial entities that have given this cabal its capacity to control the planet. The time has come to reclaim the planet for our own species, as the benevolent beings and our human cousins of the Galactic Federation have urged us to do. They won’t step in and do it for us. We must save ourselves. It appears that President Trump has declared war on the deep state, and this much anticipated transition has begun.

We are living in the most fantastic period in human history. It is just a shame that more people have not yet awakened to recognize the battle between good and evil that is now unfolding. Once we have overcome our deep state oppressors, the human species will enter a golden age of higher spiritual consciousness and advanced technologies (available to everyone) that will transform our planet as we assume our rightful place among the multitude of space-faring civilizations which deep state operatives, such as SETI and the Washington Post, are desperately trying to prevent.

On Dec. 18, the world learned that Breakthrough Listen, a privately funded search for extraterrestrial

intelligence, had found its first official candidate signal. The signal’s existence lit up the Internet. Was BLC-1, as it’s called, finally our moment of contact? Breakthrough Listen scientists, now hard at work on a paper about their findings, were quick to explain that the answer was probably “no”: Given the wealth of human-made radio signal interference out there, BLC-1 will probably turn out to be of human origin.

Their preliminary conclusion, however, does not defuse the excitement of BLC-1. The fact that there’s a candidate at all is cause for celebration. That’s because something remarkable is happening in the science of life and intelligence beyond Earth. The age of “technosignatures” is dawning.

Many people have the romantic notion that astronomers huddle over their telescopes every night and scan the skies looking for signals from distant, alien civilizations. That, unfortunately, just ain’t happening. Though the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began more than 60 years ago, there was never sufficient funding or telescope time available to make a dent in the effort. In the 1980s and 1990s, some in Congress cited public SETI funding (as little as it was) as a press-worthy example of wasteful spending. Government support mostly dried up, leaving the field running on fumes. As Jason Wright and colleagues at Penn State have demonstrated, if the sky is an ocean that needs to be searched for life, so far astronomers have splashed around in just one hot-tub’s worth of water. The reason we have not found life elsewhere in the universe is simple: We haven’t really looked.

Now, however, the long desert of opportunity may finally be giving way to a new era of growth. In 2015, Internet billionaire Yuri Milner pledged $100 million to create Breakthrough Listen, a next-generation radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence. With a single stroke, Milner helped rejuvenate the field: The project provided access to telescopes from the Parkes radio dish in Australia and the Green Bank instrument in West Virginia, and provided resources to explore new search methods and technologies. These include machine-learning initiatives designed to accelerate “classic” SETI research of the kind epitomized by BLC-1. As pioneered by Frank Drake and others (and popularized by the 1997 movie “Contact”), classic SETI searches for signals that are anomalous, as opposed to those originating from natural or human causes. Historically, the challenge has been that SETI observations produce tidal waves of data. But artificial intelligence can enable computers to identify those all-important weirdness needles in the cosmic signal haystack of all that data.

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My Dad Launched the Quest to Find Alien Intelligence

July 2, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Nadia Drake June 22, 2020 (nationalgeographic.co.uk)

• In the spring of 1960, with a budget of less then $2,000 and access to an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, a 29-year-old astronomer named Frank Drake set out to look for signs of intelligent alien life beyond Earth. For three months, the telescope scanned its targets and found nothing more than cosmic static.

• Back in the 1960s, astronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system. But Drake reasoned that other worlds might be populated by civilizations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos, as we on Earth had been doing for decades. “Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old.

• So Drake designed an experiment called Project Ozma, after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. Even though Ozma failed to find evidence of extraterrestrial technologies, the project was the first step toward solving a monumental mystery. In 1961, the National Academy of Sciences asked Drake to convene a meeting at Green Bank to further discuss the search for intelligent life. While organizing that meeting, he casually came up with the now-famous ‘Drake Equation’, a framework for estimating how many civilizations might be detectable in the Milky Way galaxy.

• Project Ozma was transformed into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or ‘SETI’. “There were radio astronomers all over the place who wanted to do SETI searches,” says Drake. But SETI projects in the US, Australia and Europe failed to gain ground. “It still had this problem of being considered flaky stuff.”

• In the Soviet Union, however, astronomers learned of Ozma and eagerly started scanning stars for signs of life. “There were far fewer restrictions on what Soviet scientists could do. They had kind of steady budgets because of the way the centralized communist government worked. They could kind of do whatever they wanted,” said science historian Rebecca Charbonneau of the University of Cambridge.

• The Soviets and Americans would meet to exchange ideas about searching for intelligent life. While the Cold War raged, U.S. and Soviet astronomers worked congenially in competition to first detect extraterrestrial life. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the relationship morphed into friendship within a global community.

• SETI had been funded by NASA. But by the 1990s, Congress began to cut federal funding for SETI projects, calling it “Martian hunting” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. The nonprofit SETI Institute, founded in 1984 at the University of California, Berkeley, was on its own.

• But in 1995, astronomers discovered the first ‘exoplanet’ outside of our own solar system. It was a Jupiter-like world, called 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a sun-like star. But it was considered inhospitable for life as we know it. Since then, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets with many having conditions favorable to life. We’ve learned that planets vastly outnumber stars in the Milky Way, providing billions of places for intelligent alien civilizations to exist.

• In 2015, a 10-year, $86 million project called Breakthrough Listen was funded by Silicon Valley tech investor Yuri Milner to harnesses the world’s sharpest radio telescopes, such as the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia, to search the nearest million stars for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Now, halfway through its tenure, it has yet to find any. It will soon add to its search the MeerKAT array of radio dishes in South Africa.

• Astronomers have expanded their search parameters beyond interstellar radio signals. They now also look for optical pulses, waste heat generated by powerful civilizations, and any other signs known as ‘technosignatures’. One of these projects is called PANOSETI, designed to scan the entire sky for fleeting but intense flashes of optical and infrared light. Led by Shelley Wright, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, the project will capture information about transient astronomical phenomena such as supernovae —and, just maybe, artificial transmissions.

• Today, some say that SETI is in the midst of a renaissance. Large projects are kicking off, funds are materializing, and astronomy courses now include a broader perspective on humanity’s place in the universe. If SETI can maintain its current momentum, astronomers are optimistic that future projects could be even more ambitious – maybe even installing a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, the only place in the solar system where Earth’s constant transmissions don’t overwhelm radio signals from the cosmos.

• SETI astronomers believe that they may soon discover another extraterrestrial civilization. Or we may be the only active civilization at this moment in time. Other civilizations may have risen and fallen during the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe. It make take a few million more years for nascent lifeforms on exoplanets to evolve complex metabolisms and technological intelligence.

• In any case, the answer to Frank Drake’s question of “where are the extraterrestrials” has the potential to change the course of humanity’s future. Drake says that he didn’t anticipate how captivating the search would be, or how SETI would grow into the enterprise it is today, although it still hasn’t completely shed the “giggle factor”. Public funding is difficult. The field has relatively few dedicated practitioners, and it has yet to fully infiltrate the halls of academia. But momentum is gathering.

• [Editor’s Note] I have no doubt that Frank Drake was sincere in his initial Ozma quest to detect errant radio signals from space to try to discover other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Likewise, Frank’s daughter Nadia has every reason to be proud of her father. But just like the rest of us, the Drakes and other honest astronomers have been obstructed by the deep state. While from the 60s to the 80s, the deep state allowed NASA funding of SETI efforts, they knew that technology embargo and the ‘giggle factor’ which the deep state had imposed on the scientific community would prevent SETI from finding anything or being taken seriously. By the 1990s, conventional technology was rapidly developing, so the deep state government cut off funding and infiltrated these programs with counter-productive deep state operatives. Those who now run SETI are only interested in using the project for disinformation purposes – to satisfy the public that smart people are working diligently but fruitlessly to discover evidence of another intelligent civilization in our galaxy, because these extraterrestrial beings simply don’t exist. In reality, intelligent extraterrestrial worlds permeate this galaxy and the entire universe. The elite deep state hierarchy has secretly been working with these extraterrestrials since World War II. During the past seventy years, they have developed a handful of secret space programs, including bases and colonies on the Moon, on Mars, and on celestial bodies throughout the solar system and beyond. As Richard Dolan famously put it, our shadow government has created a ‘breakaway civilization’, concealed from the people on Earth who serve as unwitting slaves to generate an industrial economy for these elite ‘puppet masters’ to utilize for their own purposes, which excludes the rest of us.

In the spring of 1960, a 29-year-old astronomer with streaks of preternaturally white hair and a devil-may-care attitude set out to tackle one of humanity’s most existential questions: Are we alone in the universe?

Frank Drake, then an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, was gearing up to search for radio whispers from faraway civilizations that might be sailing the cosmic sea. For such a grand quest, he had a budget of £1,600 and access to a radio telescope thought to be sensitive enough to detect transmissions from any potentially broadcasting extraterrestrials.

“Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old—and is better known to me as Dad.
At the time, looking for evidence of alien technologies was still squarely in the camp of schlocky science fiction. But for my dad, it was worth taking a risk to find out if the cosmos is as richly populated as Earth’s teeming oceans—or if humanity is adrift in a profoundly quiet interstellar expanse.

Humble and curious, with a knack for quiet mischief, Dad is committed to his science, still writing research papers and serving on committees. My early memories are full of trips to observatories and conferences, and the singular pleasure of staring through telescopes at the twinkling sky. I was never bitten by the academic astronomy bug, though.

It wasn’t until I began working as a science journalist that I realised just how risky and revolutionary Dad’s early work really was.

First light

Astronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system back in the 1960s, but Drake reasoned that if planets like Earth orbited stars like the sun, then those worlds might be populated by civilisations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos. His logic made sense: For the last century, Earthlings have been making these sorts of announcements all the time in the form of TV and radio broadcasts, military radar, and other communications that leak into space.

So he designed an experiment to search for signals coming from worlds that could be orbiting the nearby stars Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. He named the experiment Project Ozma, after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series—an homage to an adventure tale populated by exotic and unearthly beings.

Before sunrise on April 8, 1960, Drake climbed an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, jammed himself inside a trash-can-size piece of equipment, and launched humanity’s first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence—now known as SETI. For three months the telescope scanned its targets and found nothing more than cosmic static. The stars were stubbornly quiet.

“That was a disappointment,” Dad told me a few years ago. “We’d hoped that, in fact, there were radio-transmitting civilisations around almost every star.”

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We Should Message Extraterrestrial Civilizations, and Not Just Listen for Them

April 7, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article By Jerome H. Barkow March 29, 2020 (scientificamerican.com)

• The collaboration between SETI’s Breakthrough Listen project and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite provides thousands and thousands of ‘Goldilocks Zone’ targets for the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Yet so far, neither SETI nor NASA have announced contact with far off extraterrestrial civilizations or aliens visiting our planet. Ask Fermi would ask, ‘if they exist, where are they?’

• Perhaps these ET civilizations have not reached a technological level of development. Perhaps the chances of two technologically advanced civilizations are too great. Perhaps advanced civilizations have a habit of self-destructing. Perhaps they simply do not find Earth interesting.

• Is the human species on a trajectory of “species maturity”? Or is our development random? Will we as a species ever see the wisdom in less murder and self-destruction? … in increased kindness and compassion? A necessary step to our species’ maturing is to recognize the right of other animal species on Earth to exist in their own way, and to extend this to the recognition of other sovereign extraterrestrial species in the universe.

• We are rapidly becoming a spacefaring species. In the future, we will mine asteroids and create manufacturing bases on the moon. Even today, we are looking for life – albeit microscopic life – in our own solar system. Seeking life on other planets and moons is characteristic of a maturing species, understanding that our community doesn’t end at the outskirts of our solar system.

• We humans possess a natural desire to expand and meet new people outside of our world. Awareness that we are not alone could make us a morally better species. This is why SETI’s cousin METI – messaging extraterrestrial intelligence – ought to go ahead and actively call out to the galaxy. Some fear that we will expose our planet to hostile aliens. But we’ve been sending tell-tale radio waves into space for decades. Should we live in fear? In hiding? The greater likelihood is that contact with other species will help us to mature and lessen our own internecine conflict.

• Imagining galactic neighbors and what we would want to say to them is in itself a step towards species maturity. In ancient times, we looked to the stars for guidance. Today we look to them for neighbors and witnesses to our species’ trajectory.

• [Editor’s Note] I hope that people like this writer remember their casual ‘hypothetical’ position on meeting intelligent extraterrestrials. Because the thoughtful, educated people who have clung relentlessly to the deep state propaganda from places like SETI – that extraterrestrials can’t be found and probably don’t exist – are in for a rude awakening. We are witnessing the first dominoes to fall that will ultimately expose the existence of numerous intelligent ET species that have been here a long time, and have been working directly with our deep state government since World War II. The pandemic/ economic collapse/ global financial reset will begin a series of amazing public revelations, thereby revealing the deep state that has kept it all secret. We as a planet will learn about existing technologies that have been hidden from us, including: medical scans that will not only detect but cure disease; free energy devices, 3-D printers and replicators that can print anything from clothing and tools to food; warp drive propulsion and portal travel. We will learn about the evil agenda of the deep state and the depravity of its leaders and members. We will discover how these wealthy elite and a military industrial complex have actually achieved far-reaching secret space programs and breakaway civilizations. We’ll find that there already exist numerous human and extraterrestrial bases and colonies all across our solar system. We will realize that all of our history as a species has been heavily corrupted, and we will re-learn our true history, and our true reality. We are at the beginning of a new era of Earth humanity’s development.

In a press release dated Wednesday, October 23, 2019, Breakthrough Listen announced its collaboration with NASA and the space agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS is expected to add thousands more to the thousands of exoplanets already discovered. The collaboration means that Breakthrough Listen will now have specific directions in which to listen and look both for extraterrestrial signals, signs of intelligent life and technosignatures—signs of advanced technology.

Some exoplanets are in the “Goldilocks zone,” meaning that their distance from their sun likely permits the existence of liquid water, essential for life as we know it. Listening for the radio sounds of extraterrestrial life and for other technosignatures, SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has become an industry. True, so far we have found no extraterrestrials and no one (as far as we can ascertain) has visited us; this is Fermi’s Paradox, the “if they exist where are they?” issue—but there could be many reasons why we have yet to detect other intelligent species.

For one thing, most of them, like most intelligent species on our own planet, are probably not technological. Then, too, the span during which a high technology species both can and might wish to make contact with a relatively low-technology species such as our own may be limited. Technological species may even regularly destroy their capacity for interstellar contact, something that not inconceivably could be our own fate. Perhaps other intelligent species are simply not interested in us, their evolved curiosity driving them in other directions. Most likely (in my opinion), we aren’t very interesting to them, at least not yet.

How relatively easy it is to study child development, with billions of children growing up all the time, each with a brief and comparable trajectory. How hard it is to study the development of a high-technology species, with an n of 1 so far and a developmental trajectory of tens of thousands of years.
Worse, that one intelligent species we do know about has not (I hope) finished growing up. Worse still, perhaps the very idea of “species maturity” is a misguided analogy, and all we will ever have is history’s rather random walk.

If we are to mature it will require us to become less self-destructive; we must increase kindness and compassion and decrease murder and mutilation. It must include an end to environmental destruction. In practical terms, our growing up is likely to be associated with continuing technological development and change, making greater achievements possible while creating dangerous challenges. In a sense, we must move to a new neighborhood.

One aspect of the U-Haul rental that could take us there is our increasing recognition of other species as having their own kinds of intelligence and their own rights. Even as biodiversity shrinks and extinction rates soar, many of us are learning to think of the entire planet as our community.
Species maturity also means that we are learning that “home” is broader than our planet. We are rapidly becoming a spacefaring species with the necessary technology and investment being generated by competition among nations, billionaires and immense corporations. In the future, we will mine asteroids and create manufacturing bases on the moon. Even more exciting, today’s space exploration emphasizes the search for microbial life elsewhere in our solar system, or at least for the possible building blocks of life.

No one today anticipates finding intelligent, high-technology organisms anywhere in our own planetary system, but seeking life on other planets and their moons makes it easier to accept that the community in which we live does not end at the outskirts of the solar system. If it did, what a pity, as a mature species may need neighbors.

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Finding ET Could Take Long Time – Scientist Reveals Why This is Good

November 17, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “e168 Finding ET Could Take Long Time – Scientist Reveals Why This is Good” on Spreaker.

Article by Sean Martin November 8, 2019 (express.co.uk)

• Sara Seager is an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the deputy science director of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The TESS space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to survey 85 percent of the sky to study the mass, size, density, and orbit of exoplanets, and telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” across its star. By analyzing data from TESS, scientists will determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

• Breakthrough Listen and the Berkeley SETI Research Center recently announced they are partnering with NASA to use its TESS space telescope to assist SETI in its search for exoplanets that may harbor extraterrestrial intelligence (see previous ExoArticle). Said Ms Seager, “We are very enthusiastic about joining the Breakthrough Listen SETI search.”

• Findings such as other earth-like exoplanets, evidence of the past existence of water on Mars, and habitable moons in our solar system suggest conditions for life are not unique to our planet. However, there is yet to be any concrete evidence of the existence of aliens. But scientists believe it will come. But when the discovery of other life in the galaxy does come, it is likely to be a gradual process. Speaking on a panel at the (70th annual) International Astronautical Congress in Washington DC (October 21-25, 2019), Ms Seager stated, “[W]hen alien life is found, it will …[be] a painstaking process where study after study will have to confirm alien existence.” “[N]ot like the little green humanoids arriving here on earth scaring everybody.” “It’s probably going to take a long time,” which will help humanity process the concept of extraterrestrial life. Ms Seager concluded: “Out of all the exoplanet endeavors (in the world) only SETI holds the promise for identifying signs of intelligent life.”

• [Editor’s Note] Let’s see. An astronomer at MIT with the most advanced technology in the world at her disposal, is saying that there is no evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life beyond this planet. But when it happens, it will be a long and painstaking process of discovery. Sounds suspicious. Ah! Of course. They are being assisted by the Deep State puppet show known as SETI. Now it makes sense. Just more disinformation intended to assure the public that there is no such thing as UFOs and extraterrestrial beings visiting the planet, all evidence to the contrary.

Ms Seager says that the process of discovering extraterrestrial life will be very long. What exactly does she mean? Her line of thought probably goes something like this: First, SETI will one day announce the great discovery of an exoplanet with unmistakable signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Then we’ll spend fifty years sending signals back and forth. Language “experts” will spend another fifty years formulating some sort of communication with them. Then we’ll decide on a mid-point between our planets where our representatives can meet, and set out for a hundred year journey to that rendezvous. Under this presumption, it would take a thousand years or so before we would be technologically able to visit each other’s planet. Yes, given Newtonian physics and this myopic perspective, it certainly would take a looooong time.

But this planet has been visited by various extraterrestrial groups for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, influencing each stage of life and civilization. A hundred years ago we reached a level of technology that caught the attention of the various ET groups that operate in the background today. With the detonation of the first atomic bomb, both benevolent and negative ET groups began working with world military leaders and governments, and several of them met with President Eisenhower during the 1950’s. The new shadow government killed JFK to prevent him from disclosing all of this to the public, and then set up a secret cultural exchange program between Eben beings from the planet Serpo and American astronauts who went to Serpo in the early 1960’s and returned in the mid-1970’s. The world’s wealthy elite allied themselves with a group of negative ET beings in return for advanced technology that would allow them to create several secret space programs. Mind-controlled Deep State operatives were charged with maintaining this secrecy by any means. Mass mind control is the most common method.

People believe what has been drilled into them since birth. Their cognitive dissonance won’t allow them to contemplate anything except the agreed upon “scientific” narrative, as promulgated by the Deep State education system. Since humans “evolved” unassisted from a primordial soup under unique circumstances, these brain-washed scientists and academics like to point out the tremendously long odds of there being any other intelligent life in the universe. Surely there can only be a minimum of other intelligent beings that also developed by accident and happen to be at our level of technological skill at this same moment in time – if any. And as this universe is so vast, it would be a miracle that the two or three intelligent civilizations in the universe happened to find one another. And if we ever did meet an alien being, it would be so different from humans that we might not be able to effectively communicate with it, or even recognize it. The message from our most educated scientists is that the odds of humans ever finding another extraterrestrial civilization is so impossible, that for the average person its not worth even thinking about. … ‘Move along. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.’

The reality is that our universe is teeming with life. Virtually every star system in the galaxy is home to an extraterrestrial civilization. Here in our particular cluster of 52 stars, most of these civilizations are human-like, according to Corey Goode, and they are all watching and waiting to see if our time has finally come. Will we wake up to this deception that has stolen our reality, and join with our human cousins in the Galactic Federation? Will we overthrow the elite cabal and embark upon a new era of humanity on earth, with instant access to the advanced technologies that can solve our existing societal and environmental problems, and make it possible for us to expand our presence into the galaxy as we are meant to do?

The possibility of extraterrestrial life has intrigued humanity for centuries, but recent discoveries seem to prove that we are edging closer to the discovery. Findings such as Earth-like exoplanets, the past existence of water on Mars and habitable moons in our solar system suggest conditions for life are not unique to our planet. However, there is yet to be any concrete evidence of the existence of aliens, but scientists believe it will come.

But when that discovery does come, it is unlikely to be instantaneous, but rather a gradual process.

Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who focuses on detecting exoplanets, said when alien life is found, it will not be how the movies depict it where extraterrestrials invade Earth, but a painstaking process where study after study will have to confirm alien existence.

Speaking on a panel at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, Ms Seager said: “It’s probably something that’s going to be a slow discovery, not like the little green humanoids arriving here on Earth scaring everybody.

“It’s probably going to take a long time.”

Ms Seager said the slow discovery will help humanity process the concept of extraterrestrial life.

Ms Seager is also NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) deputy science director.

Just a few weeks ago, Breakthrough Listen, an organisation which scans the stars in the hope of finding alien signals, bosses said they will collaborate with scientists on TESS – which looks for planets outside the solar system.

By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

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NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials

November 6, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “e156 NASA Teams Up With Major Alien Hunting Group As They Up the Search For Extraterrestrials” on Spreaker.

Article by Sean Martin October 23, 2019 (express.co.uk)

• On October 23rd at the 70th annual International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, the SETI initiative known as ‘Breakthrough Listen’ announced that it is partnering with NASA to use its Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to search for exoplanets in the galaxy. Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives Dr Pete Worden said, “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.” “We’re looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the Universe: Are we alone?”

• Using an array of wide-field cameras to survey 85 percent of the sky, the TESS space satellite identifies telltale brightness dips that indicate planets crossing in front of its star to allow it to study the mass, size, density and orbit of small planets, including rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars. Using this data, TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets that the Breakthrough Listen team should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Says TESS Deputy Science Director Sara Seager, “Out of all the exoplanet endeavours only SETI holds the promise for identifying signs of intelligent life.”

• The technique for finding exoplanets by identifying dips in luminosity of a star allowed the Kepler space telescope to discover Boyajian’s Star in 2015 by the online astronomers known as ‘Planet Hunters’. Astronomers speculated that this dip in luminosity might be due to an artificial ‘megastructure’ or ‘Dyson Sphere’ partially constructed around the star to harbor its energy. But Dr Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, now says that “dust particles in orbit around the star are responsible for the dimming”.

• [Editor’s Note] The top tier leadership of both SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and NASA know that we have a secret space program that interacts with a variety of extraterrestrial beings and civilizations within our own solar system and throughout the galaxy. This ‘partnership’ between them is just a show to make people believe that astronomers and scientists are hard at work searching for alien civilizations on distant exoplanets, but despite their best efforts they have not found any. The reason is because both SETI and NASA exist to do the bidding of the uber-elite and their attack dog, the Deep State, who want to maintain its 70-year history of covering up the extraterrestrial presence and hiding the truth from the rest of the people on this planet.

Breakthrough Listen, an organisation which scans the stars in the hope of finding alien signals, has announced it will be

teaming up with NASA in the hunt for aliens. Making the announcement at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, Breakthrough Listen bosses said they will collaborate with scientists on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – which looks for planets outside the solar system. Together, the teams hope to answer the age-old question: Are we alone?

By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

The space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to perform a survey of 85 percent of the sky.

TESS is capable of studying the mass, size, density and orbit of a large cohort of small planets, including a sample of rocky planets in the habitable zones of their host stars.

The satellite works by searching for telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” — the passages of orbiting worlds across their parent stars’ faces.

Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: “It’s exciting that the world’s most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine.

“We’re looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the Universe: Are we alone?”

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The Order of the Dolphin: SETI’s Secret Origin Story

October 23, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by John Wenz October 10, 2018 (discovermagazine.com)

• In 1960, Harvard PhD Frank Drake and his colleagues decided that rather than using the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to determine the surface temperature of Venus or the radiation belts of Jupiter, they’d train it on two nearby stars to listen for signs of life from intelligent extraterrestrials. This was the beginning of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

• In the meantime, physician/philosopher John Lilly was trying to communicate with earth-bound intelligences. From apes to elephants to pig to octopus, these creatures seem to possess intelligent self-awareness. He found that the most intelligent were the dolphins and whales. Lilly also saw the experiments as a way to help efforts to contact extraterrestrial aliens. If we can crack the code of dolphin language, we might have a shot at decoding other alien communication.

• In 1961, a group of scientists met at green Bank to discuss the search for alien intelligence. They included Drake and Lilly, radio expert Dana Atchley, biochemist Melvin Calvin, optical astronomer Su-Shu Huang, computing pioneer Barney Oliver, Russian radio astronomer Otto Struve, and a young Carl Sagan. To begin with they wanted to get an idea of how many ET’s were possibly out there. They came up with what is no referred to as ‘The Drake Equation’.

• Lilly used this meeting to tell his colleagues about his dolphin research, pointing out that the dolphin’s brain was actually larger and more complex than the human brain. The dolphin was clearly an intelligent being. Lilly even heard signs of language and empathy in recordings of the dolphins.

• But after this 1961 meeting, Lilly began introducing substances such as ketamine and LSD in his research to assist in communicating with dolphins. Drake and some other scientists began to distance themselves from Lilly’s dolphin research, calling it “poor science” and “unreliable”. As a result, Lilly’s work has tainted subsequent attempts to understand the intelligence of dolphins.

• Still, this episode in the history scientific research spawned the SETI research of today. More resources than ever are pouring into SETI efforts, thanks in part to a $100 million project from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner called Breakthrough Listen. As we search for intelligent aliens in ‘habitable zones’, we also may discover life that existed in Mars’s past, or currently on the moons Enceladus, Europa, Titan or Triton.

• [Editor’s Note] The advances in our knowledge of intelligent extraterrestrial life that we will see in the near future, and indeed, the existence of extraterrestrials on and around our own planet, will make these initial scientific explorations trivial, if not irrelevant. We are on the brink of an entirely new and exciting exo-scientific age.

In 1961, when UFOs were all the rage, a group of top scientific minds met in secret at a rural observatory in West Virginia. At the time, the Green Bank Observatory was the biggest, baddest telescope in the burgeoning practice of radio astronomy. While the list of meeting attendees now reads like a who’s who of the era’s luminaries, the reason they gathered covertly was because of the taboo nature of their topic of discussion. These scientists wanted to find, and talk to, aliens. They didn’t know it, but they were about to launch the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

SETI First Steps

Let’s back up a moment. In 1958, a newly minted Harvard PhD named Frank Drake came to Green Bank. Usually he sought out typical radio astronomy targets — the Van Allen Belts around Earth, say, or the surface temperature of Venus, or the radiation belts of Jupiter.

But one day in 1960, Drake and his colleagues instead tuned into two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Their goal was simple: they were alien hunting, hoping to hear radio communications originating from intelligent extraterrestrials.

UFOs were popular then, but Drake’s research was legitimate, one of the first dedicated scientific searches for aliens. Drake had been spurred on by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, who the previous year had co-authored a Nature paper with the provocative title “Searching for Interstellar Communications.” It remains a foundational SETI text.

Much to Drake’s surprise, his team actually heard something in those first few experiments. Unfortunately, it ended up being just a high altitude plane. Project Ozma, as the research was called (after L Frank Baum’s fictional monarch of Oz), was both the first SETI experiment and the first SETI false alarm.

“We had failed to detect a genuine alien signal, it was true, but we had succeeded in demonstrating that searching was a feasible, and even reasonable, thing to do,” Drake wrote in his book Is Anyone Out There?, co-written with science writer Dava Sobel.

Talking to Dolphins

While Drake was launching some of the first SETI programs, John Lilly — a physician, philosopher, writer and inventor — was attempting to communicate with his own alien intelligence. He just wasn’t looking quite as far.

Humans are, in fact, surrounded by intelligence. Our fellow great apes understand the rudiments of language, and seem to possess highly organized social structures, tool-making skills and self-awareness. Creatures literally great and small — elephants and crows — have many of these qualities as well. (Alas, the pig is also remarkably intelligent; your bacon was likely self aware.)

Intelligent life isn’t isolated to land, either. The octopus brain is one of the most remarkable on Earth, and its close cousin, the cuttlefish, is no slouch either. But the superstars of the sea, to most humans, are marine mammals, especially dolphins and whales.

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Proposed NASA Budget Includes $10 Million for Hunting Aliens

May 24, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Lauren Tousignant May 10, 2018 (nypost.com)

• On May 7th, NASA’s $100M ‘Breakthrough Listen’ project announced that an enhancement to its CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia will allow it to scan millions of stars across the Milky Way over the next 60 days. The telescope will allow scientists to quickly scan the entire sky rather than one single point of the sky at a time.

• “With these new capabilities, we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail,” said Danny Price, at Breakthrough Listen. “By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen.”

• Also, a new bill in the US House of Representatives proposes $10 million a year to NASA to search for signs of extraterrestrial life, searching for technosignatures such as radio transmissions in order to “meet the NASA objective to search for life’s origin, evolution, distribution and future in the universe,” according to the bill. If fully passed, it would mark the first time since 1992 that NASA has received federal funding for the search for extraterrestrial life, and reinstate SETI into the NASA budget.

The search for extraterrestrial life is getting extra.

NASA and a project called Breakthrough Listen are both making moves to help boost the chances of finding aliens.

On May 7, Breakthrough Listen announced updates to the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, that will allow it to scan millions of stars across the Milky Way over the next 60 days.
The $100 million Breakthrough Listen project was founded by a group of scientists, including late physicist Stephen Hawking, in 2016 based on the notion that we should be listening for signs of extraterrestrials — not just looking.

Breakthrough’s previous effort with Parkes only scanned one single point of the sky at a time, with a focus on stars near the sun. But the telescope’s latest updates allow scientists to scan the entire sky at 130 gigabits per second — which is thousands of times the bandwidth of your laptop’s internet connection on its best day.

“With these new capabilities, we are scanning our galaxy in unprecedented detail,” Danny Price, a research fellow at Breakthrough Listen, said in a statement. “By trawling through these huge datasets for signatures of technological civilizations, we hope to uncover evidence that our planet, among the hundreds of billions in our galaxy, is not the only where intelligent life has arisen.”

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Could Extraterrestrials Help Us Save the Earth?

January 20, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Vikram Zutshi January 9, 2018 (opendemocracy.net)

• With the December 16, 2017, the New York Times reporting of the existence of a Pentagon UFO program and an F-18 cockpit video of a pill-shaped UFO, people are becoming less inhibited about discussing the UFO topic, or even revealing what they themselves have seen. Other governments and academics are also studying the UFO phenomena in the UK, Canada, Peru, France, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Japan and the ex-Soviet Union.

• In India, Kumaresan Ramanathan, a senior technical engineer with a Chennai based IT firm, recently became that country’s first ‘certified UFO investigator’ under the auspices of the Mutual UFO Network.

• In July 2015, physicist Stephen Hawking launched the London-based “Breakthrough Listen” scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. Hawking said, “We don’t know much about aliens, but we know about humans. If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.”

• Another member of the “Breakthrough Listen” research program, science journalist Ann Druyan said, “We may get to a period in our future where we outgrow our evolutionary baggage and evolve to become less violent and shortsighted. My hope is that extraterrestrial civilizations are not only more technologically proficient than we are but more aware of the rarity and preciousness of life in the cosmos.”

• Humanity needs a wake-up call – something that shakes us out of our complacency and short-sightedness and forces us to recognize that we all share a symbiotic relationship with each other and with this fragile planet.

• The realization that we are not alone in the universe may be exactly what is needed at this stage of our evolution to help unite us in common purpose and actualize the full potential of our shared humanity. With the realization that perhaps we are only one of many civilizations in a vast galaxy comes the need for a broader and more encompassing (and compassionate) vision of the future. It may be the catalyst required for our species to develop a planetary consciousness and cast off the old, redundant affiliations that no longer serve.

A few years ago I visited an old friend at his home in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, Argentina. Apart from its breathtaking grandeur the region is known for a more unexpected reason: local residents have reported frequent sightings of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (more commonly known as UFOs), among the highest in the world.

The region has become a popular hub for UFO enthusiasts ever since hundreds of apparitions started appearing in the mid-1990s. So widespread is the phenomenon that a new government agency called the “Committee for Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena” has been established to investigate UAPs in the region under the auspices of the Chilean Air Force.

My host Guillermo had his own story to tell. While walking his sheep dogs around the range the previous year he observed a weather phenomenon he had never seen before—a wall of fog that extended from the skies to the plains and horizontally as far as the eye could see. A high-pitched sound emerged from the fog and suddenly, out of nowhere, a large oval disc about a hundred feet in diameter flew up and hovered directly above, maneuvering back into the fog a few moments later.

Like many others who have witnessed such phenomena, Gullermo was uncomfortable talking about his experience, acutely aware of the danger of sounding like a kook. But the days of being embarrassed about UFOs may be drawing to a close. On December 16, 2017, the New York Times published an expose about a secret US Department of Defense initiative called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program that was active from 2007 to 2012, dedicated to the investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects.

The bombshell report, co-authored by three seasoned journalists including two Pulitzer prize winners, includes on-the-record statements by Luis Elizondo, the man who ran the program, videos of possible UFOs filmed by the Pentagon, and confirmation of the US Government’s activities from former Senator Harry Reid, who earmarked $22 million for them while in Congress. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” said Reid in a letter to a deputy defense secretary at the time.

In July 2015, a group led by physicist Stephen Hawking launched “Breakthrough Listen,” an initiative that’s claimed to be the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. During the launch of the initiative at the Royal Society in London, Hawking voiced his fears about what might happen in any such encounter, and why humankind needed to be much better prepared for what they might bring: “We don’t know much about aliens,” he told the audience, “but we know about humans. If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.”

Science journalist Ann Druyan—who was part of the announcement panel—seemed more upbeat: “We may get to a period in our future where we outgrow our evolutionary baggage and evolve to become less violent and shortsighted,” she said. “My hope is that extraterrestrial civilizations are not only more technologically proficient than we are but more aware of the rarity and preciousness of life in the cosmos.”

Whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist about the possibilities of life on other planets, it’s here, beyond all the technical details about UFOs and ‘Advanced Aviation Threats’ and what exactly has been witnessed by whom, that the real interest lies. To put it bluntly, if human beings are so ineffective in confronting planetary problems, shouldn’t we seek out help wherever we can find it even if it comes from an inter-planetary source?

With religious and ethnic chauvinism on the rise, self-serving corporations wreaking havoc on the environment, and populist demagogues commandeering significant swathes of the populace, it’s clear that humanity needs an urgent wake-up call—something that shakes us out of our complacency and short-sightedness and forces us to recognize that we all share a symbiotic relationship with each other and with this fragile planet.

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Scientists To Study Mysterious Interstellar Asteroid For Signs Of Alien Technology

December 14, 2017
ExoNews Editor

by Ed Mazza December 12, 2017 (huffingtonpost.com)

• Earlier this autumn, a long cigar-shaped asteroid named ‘Oumuamua’ was confirmed as the first known object from outside the solar system. [It was first reported in the ExoNews on November 24th.]

• An organization called “Breakthrough Listen” will spend $100 million to detect evidence of an extraterrestrial transmitter using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. While it should only take less than a minute to detect, they will spend ten hours observing the ‘asteroid’ across four radio bands.

Earlier this autumn, an asteroid named ’Oumuamua captured the attention of the scientific world when it was confirmed as the first known object from outside the solar system. Now, Breakthrough Listen wants to see if it’s the first sign of life beyond our planet.

On Wednesday, the $100 million project to detect potential evidence of extraterrestrials plans to use the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to observe the asteroid across four radio bands for 10 hours.
“Most likely it is of natural origin, but because it is so peculiar, we would like to check if it has any sign of artificial origin, such as radio emissions,” Avi Loeb, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and an adviser to Breakthrough Listen, told The Guardian. “If we do detect a signal that appears artificial in origin, we’ll know immediately.”
According to a news release, it will take less than a minute to detect a transmitter with the power of a cellphone.

“We don’t want to be sensational in any way, and we are very realistic about the chances this is artificial,” Yuri Milner, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind the Breakthrough Initiatives, told Scientific American. “But because this is a unique situation, we think mankind can afford 10 hours of observing time using the best equipment on the planet to check a low-probability hypothesis.”

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Tag: Breakthrough Listen